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Cover Oregon health exchange draws mixed reviews in partial launch

Cover Oregon hosts application fair in Portland

Cover Oregon's health insurance exchange on Tuesday launched a limited-access beta website originally intended to be ready last Oct. 1. The site is intended to help people avoid the application fairs and bureaucratic nightmares that have characterized the process so far.
(Faith Cathcart/The Oregonian)

The troubled Cover Oregon
health insurance exchange unveiled its long-awaited beta website to mixed reviews Tuesday
from the insurance agents and other consumer assistance workers authorized to
use it

The password-protected
website, different from the publicly available browsing site at
coveroregon.com, is supposed to allow people to be enrolled in a single
sitting.

So far, it appears to work
for some people, and not for others, according to some early users. One
enrollment Tuesday "went smooth as glass. I was shocked, actually," says Kevin
Coleman, an agent with SE Insurance Specialists
in Eugene, who says
he helped a family of four.

Another enrollment
Tuesday, of a 62-year-old Portland-area woman, was simple and but instead
triggered an endless "error loop" with mixed messages on whether the enrollment
was successful, said Lisa Lettenmaier, who owns the health insurance brokerage Health Source NW in
Tigard.

"It should
have been a slam dunk," Lettenmaier added of the experience. "Whether not she's actually enrolled, I have no clue."

The beta site of Cover Oregon
was supposed to be ready on Oct. 1, but plans were scrapped at the last minute leading
to more than four months of software repair work and tensions with the main
contractor, Oracle, all under a national spotlight. Other states' exchanges also suffered
problems, but not to the degree of Oregon's.

Though state IT oversight
analysts had urged the exchange to have a manual enrollment process in place
Oct. 1, the state's backup plan did not seriously get off the ground until
November, when the state announced plans to use hundreds of state workers and
temp agency hires to process paper application. The process was later tweaked
to allow electronic assistance, cutting processing times from months to weeks
or days.

More than 102,000 people
enrolled through the backup process as of Friday, 67,000 of them to the
Medicaid-funded Oregon Health Plan. The rest signed up for private plans.
Another 123,000 people used a "fast-track" process to bypass the exchange and
sign up for OHP.

Still, more than 20,000
people were caught in limbo due to glitches in the manual enrollment
system,
and more than 50,000 who applied in time for coverage Jan 1 did not
receive it -- often because they did not fully fill out the complicated
paper applications. Insurance
agents have reported numerous errors in eligibility determinations. Many
people
who attempted to enroll last year still don't have coverage, agents say.

Oracle has continued to try
to repair the exchange, although Cover Oregon is withholding payments pending a
fix and final reckoning over the bill. The state has hired a law firm in
preparation for potential litigation.

At last count, the exchange
still had as many as 1,200 bugs, though Tuesday's launch was intended to solve the most serious ones.

The exchange has not set a
date to unveil the website to the general public for self-enrollment, as has
been done in all other states. But in the past exchange officials have
expressed hope that it could happen by next month. Open enrollment ends March 31.

Coleman, the Eugene agent,
has been critical of the exchange's problems in the past, but says he's
heartened by how well it worked Tuesday.

The client he helped Tuesday
is less happy. She and her family submitted a paper application Dec. 18, and
have been in limbo ever since. They were forced
to pay three months of full-price premiums despite qualifying for hefty
subsidies, Coleman said.

Gov. John Kitzhaber has asked the federal government to award subsidies retroactively to
people of qualified income who were forced to bypass the exchange for coverage.